Pairing: USA vs Japan FIGHT!

Let’s say you want to study the relationship between economic inequality and attitude toward the self, with social hierarchy perhaps a common cause. “Attitude toward the self” isn’t well-defined and hard to measure, and there’s little multinational data. What you could do is try to directly compare two countries. You could pick the USA, a highly economically unequal society, and Japan, a relatively economically equal society (forget that Japan is highly hierarchical for the moment).

What else could result in American and Japanese attitudes differing?

The US is much more multiracial than Japan

The US is mostly Christian, Japan Buddhist and Shinto

Japan has universal health insurance

Japan lost the Second World War

Evangelion was better in the original language

The most fundamental problem is sample size: even if you had identical twin countries, one pair ain’t enough. If you want to draw a strong conclusion from one pair, you need some strong qualitative arguments. If you want strong conclusions from quantitative data, you need quite a bit of data, and strong assumptions on top of that.